How And Why You Should Boost Live Stream Engagement For Your Next Event

As an audience development platform, most of AmpLive’s new clients are aiming to expand their reach. We see this all the time, and it makes perfect sense… For a lot of people, the goal is to simply get their live video in front of as many qualified (real human) eyeballs as possible. In this case, you would probably care primarily about the number of viewers your live stream encountered. In terms of brand recognition and awareness, this is a perfectly valid metric to focus on.

However, over the years we’ve found that one important metric may get lost beneath the viewer number, and it really needs attention. This is the “engaged viewer” metric.

So, what does that mean, exactly? And how does it tie into hitting other goals you may have, like driving action from your viewers?

First, it might be helpful to define an engagement as it relates to live content….

In terms of video content, you probably already know that engagement usually relates to action. The exact definitions vary between platforms. On the AmpLive platform, any unique user action in relation to your live video (such as a mouse-over, unmute, or click on the creative or the video player) qualifies as an engagement. The reason an engagement is so valuable is that it’s the best indication of someone discovering and watching your content. Think of an engagement as a viewer who has met the most stringent standards.

To be a viewer, you have to have the player 100% in-view (not 1 pixel below the fold, or behind another open tab) for a minimum of 5 seconds. (It’s worth noting here that these requirements vary among platforms… Facebook Live, for example, only requires 3 seconds of full view to qualify a viewer.) To be an engaged viewer, you have to meet all of those parameters, AND mouse over the player, unmute, or click. So it makes sense that increasing the % of viewers who become engaged, and then leveraging those engaged viewers for retargeting would be your best strategy for ultimately converting viewers.

So How Do I Increase My Engagement Rate Through Segmentation?

A typical engagement rate on our platform is around 12%, and there are definitely some optimization steps you can follow between events to ensure you are maximizing your potential for engagement.

Always include past engaged audiences from your previous boosts in your targeting strategy. This audience has interacted with your content before and is more likely to interact again.

Pull a report of the top-performing interests and job titles from your dashboard overview. Focus on targeting those audiences for future events. Note that you may notice a decrease in overall reach as you narrow down your targeting. However, these audiences will perform better and be more likely to engage, click, or take another action.

And How Do I Optimize Distribution to Maximize Engagement?

You can remove certain sites from your distribution list if they’re proving to consistently under-perform in terms of engagement.At this point, you’ll really need to be working with a distribution tool and a team. If you’re interested in removing certain under-performing publishers or sites, the AmpLive Operations team can also help create a customized site list to run against. Look at where your live stream is being displayed and which locations are getting the best engagement (on the AmpLive Platform you would download the “Top Boost Sources” report and then sort the sites by engagement rate). Then, adjust your parameters. You can send an email to your account manager and they can implement a small blacklist on the back end moving forward, so you don’t waste time showing your content to people who aren’t engaging with it. It will always be a good idea to download and monitor that report every few events.

To Recap…

Once again, engagement is the first step towards converting a viewer. Start working towards improving the engagement rate and you’ll be in a much better position to convert your live viewers into customers later on!

Share

Subscribe to our mailing list

Stay up to date on the live streaming space with data and insights from our latest research. Please enter your email below: